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Chef Jamie Oliver’s story, at least in terms of his rise to fame with “The Naked Chef,” is a story about filmmaking. He and the BBC Two documentary crew behind the series broke with the studio-based, locked down and orderly conventions of cooking shows to shoot Oliver a lot more in the style of a documentary — lots of handheld, verite footage and the sense, well before ring-lit YouTube tutorials and Twitch muckbangs, of cooking with a mate.

It’s a fitting detail to come up during Oliver’s episode of “Chef’s Table: Legends” because over the course of its 10 seasons, the Netflix series has itself reshaped the landscape of documentary food programming. “Chef’s Table” embraces a visual approach that owes more to narrative-style cinematography as it does to the conventions of documentary. The goal was to give every plate and the environment surrounding each subject the same visual intention...

To make it 10 years in a world that always feels hungry for the next big thing is no small feat. Chef’s Table, then, has much to celebrate as it enters its second decade of documenting the most interesting, innovative, and out-of-this-world chefs from all over the globe. Over the course of its lifetime, the docuseries has become the gold standard in foodie entertainment with hour-long, exhaustively detailed and sumptuously shot episodes about the culinary world’s brightest stars, including Massimo Bottura, Dominique Crenn, Francis Mallmann, Mashama Bailey, Evan Funke, and Asma Khan, to name a few.

Created by Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentarian David Gelb, Chef’s Table is an immersive experience that involves the show’s crew spending weeks with their subjects to get a close, inside look at the detailed workings of their kitchens. Think of it as the “slow food” of cooking shows, concerned with quality and care...

Chef’s Table has become one of television’s most celebrated food-themed programs since it debuted in 2015, but there was a time the Netflix series faced an uphill battle getting made.

“Nobody wanted to hear a pitch about a food show without a celebrity host attached to it except for Netflix,” creator and executive producer David Gelb recalls. “I’m very fortunate they had the vision to let me come in and make the show with them, which is really unique in the food space with no host and no culinary instruction.”

Now in its sixth season, Chef’s Table is Emmy-nominated again this year for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. Throughout its history, the show has focused each episode on a single chef.

“It’s about a biographical, emotional journey through a creative life,” Gelb explains. “The focus [is] on story, on passionate characters, on emotion and really looking at why chefs cook,...